


i'd run away and hide (with you)

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: (aka proko and k), Abusive Relationships, Blowjobs, But also abusive shit, Choking, Future Fic, Grinding, Joseph Kavinsky Lives, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, K isn't nice, Kind of Sexy Choking?, M/M, Prokopenko Lives, Recreational Drug Use, actual angel ronan lynch, and don't makeup, declan is everybody's d a d d y, it's some shit, like the angels from legion, mentions of Opal but no actual Opal onscreen interactions, obscure references to past noncon, proko and k break up, proko becomes a farmer, realistic k/proko relationship, with the childbirthing and paul bettany
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-07 03:49:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16400789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: Proko met finals week with a kind of frenzied fog that meant he was detached from the feeling of panic that should’ve accompanied the realization that hey, hewasn’t graduating.(AKA, the one where nobody died on the Fourth of July, Proko doesn't graduate from Aglionby, and somehow ends up living at the Barns. With sexy results.)





	i'd run away and hide (with you)

**Author's Note:**

> Is this a love letter to Declan Lynch? Yes.
> 
> Would I let Declan Lynch W R E C K me? Yes.
> 
> That's it. That's the fic. The Google Doc was called 'there's a legend in the house here to rock the party' so y'all better just appreciate how much Santana I listened to in my bathtub to write this filth.

As it turned out, there were not a lot of career options for someone who’d spent all of high school snorting pills and lighting fires and making general mischief. K had managed to pull passing exam grades out of his magical ass. Skov had the advantage of being the savior of the Aglionby Academy soccer team; he’d bought his diploma with sweat and blood and three national titles. Swan had the most connections of anyone— he’d graduate and then go to Oxford and then go on to kill people in the name of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Jiang, being more superhuman than even K, an  _ actual magician,  _ had a 4.2 GPA despite his flushing even more coke up his elegant nose than Proko had managed. 

Proko met finals week with a kind of frenzied fog that meant he was detached from the feeling of panic that should’ve accompanied the realization that  _ hey,  _ he  _ wasn’t graduating.  _

Luckily there were pills for all of it, greens and blues and pinks spilling down his throat from K’s generous hands. Pills to keep him quiet and pills to keep him calm and pills to make him  _ forget,  _ and so Proko didn’t worry about his lack of a degree until after graduation was over and done with, when he was the only one at the afterparty who  _ didn’t _ have a mortarboard to snort lines of coke off of. 

“What the fuck am I gonna do,” Proko mumbled numbly, blinking hard as everyone around buzzed with the excitement that came from this being the  _ last party ever!  _ Like there would never ever be another rager, like they weren’t going off to colleges and preparatory programs where the kegs were there  _ legally  _ and the girls were hotter than any of the townies in Henrietta ever even  _ thought  _ about being. 

Before he could start  _ really  _ freaking the fuck out, though, there was K at his side bellowing incomprehensibly, dragging him to the kitchen to duct-tape two forties to his hands. 

The party became a blur very quickly after that; Proko’s only real memory was of K blowing him messily against the beer pong table after everyone was either passed out or gone, the empty bottles still taped to his hands clunking painfully against K’s skull every time Proko forgot himself and tried to clutch at K’s hair. 

He woke up with no pants on and the bottles still fastened to his now-cramping hands; one of the Vancrewver amiably helped him pull the tape off so he could try to shape himself into something at least  _ resembling  _ a human being. 

Downstairs, K was sucking down a Bloody Mary and groaning loudly about his college plans to a few hungover members of the lacrosse team and Skov.  _ Fuckin’ orientation in seven fucking weeks, goddamn!  _

Proko gave a stilted, nauseous  _ yo  _ to those who were conscious; K barely acknowledged him, and then only to laugh and deflect one of the LAXbros’ mumbled query about  _ where’re you going to school, bro?  _ by saying  _ Proko’s gonna come fuck it up with me at Princey,  _ dismissive, like of  _ course  _ Proko wanted to play tagalong all through college, living on K’s whims and gagging on his cock whenever. 

It was a thorn of irritation that settled itself into Proko’s nape, winding its way into the overgrown hair that was getting too long to call itself an undercut, roots blue-black and skunked against his peroxide-blonde ends.  _ Proko’s gonna come fuck it up with me at Princey,  _ K had said— and maybe that’s why he’d been so blasé about the entire  _ not graduating  _ thing, because he didn’t  _ care.  _ Proko graduating was immaterial; K had dreamt him up, and K didn’t care if he had a high school diploma or not. In K’s mind, Proko was as much an accessory as his Rolex, or the Mitsu. 

The realization was not a new one, but it stung all the same. 

 

***

 

“I’m not going.” The words fell heavy as lead between them, and for a moment K carried on as if Proko had not spoken at all, unused to dissension from any of the pack, much less the one he’d dreamt to life himself. His own  _ personal  _ hound. 

(His own personal  _ bitch.)  _

K stopped short in the middle of a sentence about the apartment his fake dad had rented him; Proko’s words finally registered, and he took on an odd half-grin, as if waiting for the punchline. 

It did not come. 

“The fuck?” K asked, very nearly good-naturedly. 

“I’m not going,” Proko repeated, stronger this time. Less like he felt on the inside, sick and unsure and  _ scared.  _ “I can’t go off to fucking Princeton, I didn’t even graduate.” 

K blinked and then shrugged elaborately. “Like you’re gonna do—“ he cut himself off for the second time in as many minutes, and Proko heard the words ringing between them as if he’d spoken them.  _ Like you’re gonna do shit with your life anyway.  _

“I’m not going.” It was like the stories he fake-remembered his Baba telling him as a kid—  _ say it thrice and it will be, Ilya.  _

K barked a laugh, sharp and mean and  _ incredulous.  _ “Babe, where the fuck else are you gonna go?” He meant, of course,  _ who will have you? What money will you have? What the fuck do you think you’re gonna do?  _

It was a stinging cut, a superficial kind of pain. He had no one else but K, not really. He was a forgery, patterned after an orphan boy alone in the world, K’s childhood friend who’d died unceremoniously months after being ranked into Boris Kavinsky’s crew with a bullet between his eyes, freshly-fourteen with a  _ K  _ tattooed on his left hand. 

K had made Proko without the tattoo, but then had put it on, himself, with a rigged up stick-n-poke kit one night not long after he’d woken with the raw-skinned doppelganger in his bed, intent, like he was fixing a mistake on an important assignment. 

All of his memories were fabrications; bits and pieces of the real Proko, mixed up with things K had seen in movies and lived through himself. Sometimes he forgot that he and K were two separate beings; sometimes he felt so much like K it ached, like he was a limb unsanctimoniously torn from a body. 

Sometimes, like now, he felt so alien as to be another species, a stranger, in K’s god-blooded midst. 

“I’ve got to have my own life.” K snorted, wild-eyed and  _ furious  _ and, probably, terrified. Cruel with it. Furious that Proko was the one to make him  _ feel things,  _ when he’d spent years (and years) numbing himself. 

“You don’t  _ have  _ your own life.” K murmured, low and dangerous, and then his hands were on Proko’s face, his throat, tight enough to bruise. 

His heart stuttered and thrummed in his chest at the look in K’s eyes, flat and mean and  _ coiled.  _ His breath came faster, his vision brightening. Whatever was about to happen, it wasn’t going to be good. 

Maybe this was where it would all stop. Where it would end— in his dorm room, with an empty suitcase on the stripped-down bed and no one left to witness his snuffing-out. 

“You’re _ mine,  _ Dreamboy,” K breathed, breath warm and sweet like candy on Proko’s face. “Where’d you think you’re gonna go?” 

“K—“ he choked out, and part of his body sang with K’s touch, his cock hardening in his jeans from the memory of all the times K had had him like this, fucked up and strung out and  _ breathless.  _ The other part of him recoiled, and wanted to  _ run,  _ and felt like a butterfly pinned, still alive, behind the glass of some cool-eyed collector. He half-remembered, wildly, a short story he’d read once, in Freshman English, where that bird guy, the artist,  _ Audubon,  _ he’d been the villain— had been a  _ killer,  _ had killed so many fucking beautiful things because he didn’t understand that they were worth something, that they were precious and deserving— Proko saw black spots instead of K’s face and his legs kicked out and he thought  _ finally, finally—  _

and then he was free, and  _ gasping, _ choking and sputtering and retching, and K above him looked green and afraid and like he was trying desperately to seem unaffected. “Don’t fucking say that shit again,” he warned, and left, the words he’d left unsaid hanging in the air.  _ Or I don’t know what I’ll do.  _

Proko lay on the floor and tried to decide if he felt more disappointed or frightened. 

It was a tie, he decided finally, and got up, shaking, to walk his ass down to the 7-11 for some cigarettes, the keys to his dreamt-up Golf in a pile of change and loose pills and starlight mints on his nightstand. 

  
  


***

 

“You’re Prokopenko,” the voice was low, and melodical. Unlike any of the other voices Proko knew; it pronounced his name correctly, so probably it wasn’t a yokel local. He waited a long moment before turning around, hands still fumbling to tear open the cellophane on his Camels. It was something that had always made K angry— his refusal to smoke Parliaments. He hated the taste of the things. Apparently they’d been real Prokopenko’s brand of choice. The disconnect had infuriated K— the thought that his forgery was so imperfect. 

The guy was golden— golden all over, a study in it, his skin sunkissed and his hair like cornsilks and his smile wide and white. He was disconcertingly beautiful, too-perfect. 

He was Ronan Lynch’s little brother, and Prokopenko wanted to laugh. It was the first time they’d ever been face-to-face, and now here he was, full up of family secrets. 

“You’re a Dream.” He retorted, stuffing a smoke between his lips. 

Little Lynch didn’t deny it— he cocked his head like a particularly dim-witted golden retriever, a move both calculated and disarming. Prokopenko was sure it fooled everyone else in Henrietta. The kid smiled vacantly, but his eyes were the same as his brother’s. Sharp as glass, and all-seeing. 

Those eyes scraped over Proko, from his neglected dye job to his skin mottled with bruises to the shake in his fingers, and saw entirely too much. 

“My brother’s living by himself now,” the kid said conversationally, tone light, guileless. He could’ve been another laxbro talking about his summer plans in K’s kitchen. 

(He could’ve been, but he wasn’t.) 

“Fucking congratulations,” Proko spat back, and the kid — _ Matthew,  _ fucking Irish Catholics— gave a  _ yawn,  _ audaciously young and handsome with his broad shoulders widening and rolling. 

“It’s called the Barns. Drive like, sixty miles on I-35 and hang a left. Can’t miss it.” With that, Matthew sauntered off, light radiating from his pores and a chorus of fucking angels singing along with his footsteps. 

“What the fuck,” Proko shouted at his back, and winced when his bruised vocal chords protested the volume. 

 

***

 

Lynch was possibly the worst fucking roommate in the whole fucking world. He was bitchy and squinty and long-suffering and  _ dramatic,  _ full of manpain and shit like he was the only person in the whole goddamn world who had problems. 

Fucking hell, he wasn’t even the only person in a  _ half mile radius  _ who had  _ problems.  _

Proko both abhorred and adored the motherfucker, and would die before admitting to either emotion, preferring instead to draw his apathetic exterior around himself like a shield. 

Lynch was a terrible fucking roommate, but he was also freakishly  _ considerate,  _ like he spent half his fucking brainpower on figuring out ways he could make the lives of the people around him easier, since his mere presence was such an inconvenience to literally  _ everyone.  _

The third morning Proko woke up with the dawn and went to feed the chickens and cows in his skinny jeans and fancy Adidas sneakers, there was a pile of work clothes and a pair of boots left outside his bedroom door. 

The second time Lynch noticed Proko tossing away a book in frustration, he ordered a whole fucking  _ stack  _ of them in Russian, the Cyrillic a whole fucking lot easier to process after a long day of backbreaking farm labor to forget his whole bullshit life. It was ridiculous, but since Lynch didn’t have a fucking television Proko didn’t throw a fit about it. He needed some kind of entertainment, after all. 

It only took one flinch after Lynch called him a  _ bitch  _ for it to be seemingly erased from the Dreamer’s vocabulary. 

Lynch was a terrible fucking roommate, except he really  _ wasn’t,  _ and Proko was getting soft from all the mornings he woke up with no bruises, no aches, no headaches combined with the taste of mystery spunk in his mouth and no memory of the night before. 

(He missed K the way someone missed a limb stricken with gangrene; he missed him in the dead of night with their mishmashed memories tangled up in his Dreamt-up skull; he missed him and screamed himself awake from nightmares of dying at his hands.) 

 

***

 

“I’ve been tired for… a long time,” Proko said on an exhale, smoke rolling out from between his parted lips. It was dark on the porch; the only substantial light came from the cherry on his cigarette. It threw the straight, harsh lines of Proko’s face into soft relief, and Declan was struck by how fucking  _ pretty  _ he looked, fragile and breakable. 

Declan liked breakable things; he liked to bend them as far as he could without snapping them. He didn’t mind their jagged edges. He didn’t mind the implicit threat in them. He found fragile things to be more honest than others. He was so fucking sick of lies. He was so fucking sick of liars; they reminded him too much of himself. 

(He was so fucking sick of himself.) 

“So close your eyes,” Declan said with the corners of his lips tugging into an unwilling kind of smirk. An almost-mean expression, trembling with earnestness, hidden by darkness. Like so much of himself was. 

He knelt on the worn-smooth boards, shouldering his way between Prokopenko’s knees, steadying the porch swing that Proko sat upon with his hands, his ribs. Up close, Proko smelled like apples and freshly cut grass and Declan’s childhood home. He remembered reading in a Jeffrey Eugenides book the sentiment that every family had its own distinct scent. It was true. The Barns had always smelled heady and thick and comforting— like the crook of the neck of someone you loved. Proko smelled like that, now, from sleeping in Declan’s old bed. 

It made him shiver, to think of Proko sleeping in the same place that he’d first learned of pleasure, childish and new. Round-cheeked and unable to even  _ imagine  _ the horrors that would come. Warm and  _ happy  _ and utterly, completely  _ naive.  _ Helpless pleasure had turned into grim desire; he grew older and realized that sex was just another way to attain power, to manipulate people. 

Now Declan was twenty years old, still a young man, and helpless again. Relearning. Rediscovering  _ pleasure,  _ knelt before a spindly, rosy-mouthed Dreamthing in the place where he’d been born.

“Are you going to read me a bedtime story?” Proko murmured, lips barely moving, eyes closed obediently. His eyelashes curled, black as soot, away from his temples. 

“Once upon a time…” Declan rasped, and opened up Proko’s belt, bending his head and applying all his focus to the task at hand. 

Proko sighed above him, boneless; that was something odd, something intriguing. He was never loud, like this. Declan wondered if he’d always been quiet, or if there was something  _ dis _ quieting about their time together that ushered in an unnatural lowering of volume. He was always relaxed, almost asleep, beneath Declan’s touch.

Maybe that was the nature of Dreamthings. Maybe their greatest pleasure was to sleep. To dream. 

Proko shivered when Declan smoothed a proprietary hand over the soft smoothness of his belly. His eyes did not open. His mouth parted, tongue darting out to wet his dry lips. His cigarette had burnt to one long cylinder of ash in his hand. 

Declan, full to the tonsils of  _ Proko,  _ full in his lungs and his hands and his traitorous, blackened, lying,  _ still beating  _ heart, wished that they  _ were  _ asleep. That the world was a dream, and everything would settle itself. That Declan could settle himself. 

He was so tired of living in the real world. 

How could it compare to a childhood spent laughing, golden, in a dream brought to life? 

He envied Proko even as he ached for him, and nothing could ever be the same but, Declan wondered, did it have to be so  _ bleak?  _ The thought of returning to D.C. made him recoil. The thought of Matthew, angelic and beaming, against the backdrop of the concrete urban landscape made him nauseous. 

“Declan,” Proko sighed, sweet as strawberries in the summertime, plucked straight from the vine. Another man’s dream, but Declan’s reality. 

There was something powerful in that. 

And Declan Lynch, no matter what fanciful desires he buried deep in his chest, desired power above all else. 

Such was the way of men. 

Declan was used to being alone in his desire; he’d grown up among Dreamers and Dreamthings, after all. The burden of greed was his own to carry. 

Greedily, he took Proko even deeper, until he was choking. Until he couldn’t think of anything else.  _ Mine, mine, mine,  _ he thought, taking in the minute tremors and tremblings of Prokopenko on the cusp of orgasm.  _ Give it all to me.  _

Prokopenko sighed, simmering like sugar on the stove at Christmastime, crystallizing. Candied.  _ Pink.  _

Prokopenko sighed, slitting his eyes open to meet Declan’s, smiled a bit, and  _ did.  _

 

***

 

Ronan scoffed, looking over Proko with dismissive eyes. Another man’s Dream was of no real interest to a Dreamer; well, it  _ was,  _ they  _ were,  _ but only because of the insights they gave to that man’s insides. His inner-workings, his desires, his fears. 

Prokopenko was the product of a pre-adolescent Kavinsky’s misguided attempts at  _ making friends.  _ Unsurprisingly, the (now) former Devil of Henrietta had not quite grasped the concept and instead went headlong over the fucking deep-end, dreaming up what Ronan could only assume was  _ meant _ to be a limpet lackey fucktoy and instead, to K’s infinite and irate surprise, was a living, breathing  _ boy.  _

A living, breathing boy with sharply cut, perfectly-symmetrical features and ears that stuck out a little too far. Odd-looking, and gawky, with eyes a shade too dark and collarbones permanently thrown into sharp relief, collecting shadows in broad daylight. 

“Wow,” Proko had said flatly, the first time Ronan had pointed out his awkward construction, as inoffensive as Ronan ever was. “How flattering.” He was kind of a prissy bitch, Ronan noted, and not for the first time since he’d taken the Dreamboy on as a roommate. 

Still, he had shrugged, and bared his teeth, squinting into the noon sun, all of his long limbs reclined on the grass of the front lawn. Yards away, Opal had been frolicking. “Atrox melior dulcissima veritas mendaciis.”  _ The bitter truth is better than the sweetest lies.  _

Proko had only rolled his eyes and grumbled about  _ geekass motherfuckers,  _ but he hadn’t moved from the porch swing to storm off in a huff, either, so Ronan hadn’t been overly concerned with appeasing him. 

Now they lay sprawled in Ronan’s childhood bed, with everyone who had ever known him far away —in D.C., in Brazil, in fucking  _ Berkeley—  _ and everyone who had known the  _ real  _ Prokopenko either dead or snorting lines of blow off a grad student’s ass at Princeton. 

Prokopenko was giving him the  _ Look,  _ the dark-eyed wet-mouthed  _ Look  _ that the real Prokopenko had never made. A Look all his own, fashioned after Kirsten Dunst, Leonardo DiCaprio, every simmering slip of a 90s sex symbol heroin-chic porcelain doll nymphomaniac that he’d ever seen on a screen. He was a good mimic, which was a happy enough talent when you had only the memories and sensibilities deemed necessary for you to have by the megalomaniacal anarchist thirteen year old that brought you to life. 

It wasn’t sexy; Ronan didn’t find anything about Prokopenko  _ sexy,  _ not really, not the way that he imagined he ought to. Attraction for him had never been about that— he’d not loved Gansey, Adam, even  _ K,  _ for their spit-slick lips and broad shoulders and curling eyelashes, though they all three had those features in spades. 

And so it was the same with Prokopenko— he was not attracted to his plasticine gestures of seduction, but instead pitied him, a plaything discarded, and felt for him, thinking of the Dreamer who’d left him behind, too, even if Niall Lynch’s abandonment wasn’t  _ quite  _ the discordant exit that Kavinsky had staged at the beginning of the summer. He appreciated the way that his hand fit into the curve of Proko’s waist, the way Proko was warm and curled his long limbs around Ronan’s like there was nowhere else he’d rather be. He enjoyed the little arching sighs of Prokopenko pressed against him, and the way he curled his fingers greedily around Ronan’s skull, like he wanted to crawl inside of it. 

Prokopenko was a different sort of creature than any other Ronan had known; another man’s Dream. 

He lay with Ronan like the spoils of some secret war, though, and it felt like victory to bite the ridge of his sternum, leave his mark. 

Prokopenko gasped, full-lunged, diamond-toothed. A Dream desperate for a Dreamer. His thighs flexed. Ronan made no move to do anything else, and Proko only stroked his fingers over the growing-out hair under his hands, a practiced comfort. 

Ronan imagined him holding Kavinsky like this, and the thought had him huffing a laugh. He fell asleep like that, wrapped up in a Dream. 

 

***

 

K stood in the driveway and was so incongruous to the backdrop of the Barns that Proko wanted to laugh, kind of. 

He didn’t, because mostly he wanted to either throw up or drop to his knees, ears hot with shame and fists clenched and phantom twinges of pain all over his body, remembering rough handling and just-because beatings and brutal fuckfests, remembering how part of him craved the violence and part of him wanted to never be touched again afterwards, every fucking time. 

“So this is it,” K said, eyes flicking around and somehow both dismissive and incredulous.  _ So this is it,  _ a whole wonderland of emerald green grass and towering buildings and memories and  _ fireflies,  _ a piece of a Dream. 

Not K’s Dream, though Prokopenko felt plenty at home. Felt  _ lighter,  _ like he was changing all the time. Like he could  _ breathe.  _

“So this is it.” He parroted back, and made himself draw up to his fullest height, shoving down the pain and panic. Tried to make himself into the kind of creation who was not afraid of its creator. The kind of dream not afraid of its dreamer. 

(He  _ wasn’t  _ afraid of K, he realized. He was afraid of  _ himself.  _ He was afraid of going back to K, willing and desperate and pliant, of dying because he wasn’t strong enough to choose to keep  _ living.)  _

“Traitor,” K named him, soft and almost-surprised. His eyes were hidden by his sunglasses, and he sounded his age, for once. He sounded like had the morning he’d first woken with Proko in his bed, before he realized what he’d done. What he  _ hadn’t  _ done. 

(Prokopenko was not a dead boy brought back from the grave; he was a living boy birthed from the mind of a terrified and lonely child.) 

“Yes.” Proko said, and bowed his head under the weight of it like accepting a crown.  _ Traitor,  _ K said, the only way he knew to surrender. 

K stood for another long moment, staring, like he wanted to memorize Proko. Like he’d never see him again. 

Proko remembered K’s parting words in his dorm, which felt so long ago now but was only a few months past. Remembered the way he said them, like he was pleading with Proko not to challenge the furious animal that lived in his chest. Like he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t control himself, and knew it. 

K left then, and as soon as the Evo was out of sight Proko sagged, pressing the heels of his hands so hard to his eyes that he saw stars. 

It was done. 

 

***

 

Declan was sitting on the porch steps when Proko reappeared after three days of not leaving his room except to piss or forage for more food in the middle of the night, in the wake of his  _ resolution  _ with K. 

He still wore half of his fancy suit, and Proko leaned against the screen door for a moment, just looking, before interrupting the silence with the squeal of the oil-starved door hinges. 

Declan tipped his head up to catch Proko’s eye; for a moment all Proko could think about was the last time they’d been on this porch together, and his gut churned warm with arousal and hot with unfamiliar embarrassment. 

“C’mere,” Declan said, and patted his lap, the spread of his muscular thighs in his outrageously expensive pants. Proko was frozen with the implication for a second, his ears getting hot, before he  _ went,  _ settling himself into Declan’s embrace. 

How strange it was, to be  _ held.  _

Declan breathed against his throat. Proko held still, feeling soft and new beneath Declan’s touch, which had always been so gentle he could barely stand it. 

(In the best, most impossible way.)

_ I love this,  _ Proko wanted to whisper.  _ I love this, I love you, I love Ronan and Matthew and Opal and this place, don’t ever make me leave.  _

He didn’t, but he thought Declan heard him anyway, because his arms tightened around Proko and he laid the softest, briefest kiss on Proko’s earlobe. 

**Author's Note:**

> follow me @ brophigenia.tumblr.com, because I'm sick of my porno sideblog having more followers than my Art(TM) Sideblog.


End file.
